Episode 129: Self-Care During Bar Prep
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Episode 129: Self-Care During Bar Prep Lee Burgess: Welcome to the Law School Toolbox Podcast. Today, we're talking about ways to engage in self-care for the bar exam without breaking the bank. Your Law School Toolbox hosts are Alison Monahan and Lee Burgess, that's me. We're here to demystify the law school and early legal career experience, so you'll be the best law student and lawyer you can be. We're the co-creators of the Law School Toolbox, the Bar Exam Toolbox, and the career-related website, CareerDicta. Alison always runs The Girl's Guide to Law School. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us. You can reach us via the contact form on lawschooltoolbox.com and we'd love to hear from you and with that, let's get started. Alison Monahan: Welcome back. Today, we're talking about something that's incredibly important for everyone who's preparing for the bar, which is self-care. Because let's face it, studying for the bar exam is stressful and actually so is legal practice. So, working on self-care during the bar is the thing that will probably help you pass and also help you in your career later. And the good news is this doesn't have to be all that complicated or expensive. I mean, it's not just a New Year's resolution about waking up, working out 7 days a week or never eating a drop of sugar again. I mean those might be great goals if it works for you, but self-care is really about simple goals. So, today we're going to talk about realistic, simple things you can do to help yourself feel better and manage the stress and anxiety that comes inevitably when you're studying for the bar exam. So, Lee what's first on your list? Lee Burgess: So, the first one is definitely cheap and easy and it's breathing. Alison Monahan: Well, we do have to breathe. Lee Burgess: We do have to breathe. I mean we're all alive. We have to breathe but I think it is something that we tend to ignore. I know that I found myself ignoring it at various points. When you're working hard, or you're stressed because we actually tend to hold our breath when we get stressed or anxious. Just breathing normally, deeply, and consistency actually gets your brain the oxygen it needs to work properly and there of course are some different kind of breathing techniques we're going to talk about in a second. But I think it is important if you are sitting at a table while you're listening to this and to take a moment and just think about how you're sitting in your body because it's possible you are hunched off, which is compressing the front part of your body and you may find yourself that you're not even taking deep breaths, which means that you are kind of cheating yourself out of one of the things that your body needs to work correctly. But also, to calm anxiety and stress. Alison Monahan: Yeah, it's funny when you were saying that. I was actually noticing that I was. My shoulders were hunched forward and right at the bottom, kind of the point of my ribcage, where the ribs come together, I felt like that's where my breath was, which is only about halfway down your lungs. So, I just made an effort to sit up straight, put my shoulders back, and I was like, "Oh wow. I am breathing a lot better now." Lee Burgess: Yeah. I mean, it's really weird when you start to be a little conscious of it, of how poorly we're all doing something that is really essential to life. One of the things that most of us want to be doing but we don't really do is this idea of belly breathing. If you've even taken a yoga class, you probably heard about belly breathing. But basically 98% of our oxygen receptors are located in the lungs, lower lobes, so that means if you're hunched over your desk, you're totally cheating your body out of that. Alison Monahan: So, I'm only getting like 2% of the oxygen I should be getting. Lee Burgess: Right. In order to meaningfully trigger your brain's relaxation response, you've got to take deep breaths into your abdomen. Sometimes this can be hard to do when you're sitting but it's important to recognize that the shallow and quick breathing we often do when we're working can actually trigger the stress response because your body doesn't think you're getting enough oxygen. So, if you catch yourself either holding your breath or if your breath is just lingering at chest level, you want to take a few of these belly breaths. Some people even recommend that you can imagine your breath has a color and as you breathe, visualize the color moving from your chest all the way down to the belly. You can put your hand on your belly and start to notice that your belly is moving. If your belly is not moving, breath is not going in and out of it. Then also start to notice while you're doing this breathing, where are you holding stress? Places that most of us hold stress that we never think about is in your jaw. I think, unless you've had jaw issues. But so often, I know when I'm doing yoga or something like that, the teacher would always say, "Make sure that your jaw is relaxed." Then you realize that you're in some crazy pose and my jaw is all clenched and your toe is compressed. It's parts of your body that you don't necessarily notice that you're doing this. It's like, are you scrunching your lips? Do your shoulders creep up to your ears? Just start to acknowledge what you're doing in your body and see if you can release that tension and think about those points of tension as you breathe. You can do this for a few minutes, a few seconds. But no matter what you do, your brain and your body's going to be better oxygenated. So, it's going to be more relaxed and ready to work and memorize things. It's really funny. It's something so simple and yet we're all so bad at it, most of us are. Episode 129: Self-Care During Bar Prep Page 2 of 16 LawSchoolToolbox.com Alison Monahan: Yeah. For sure. I think it's also something that's useful to take even into the exam room with you. If you're imagining how it's going to be when you take the bar, you're probably not going to be feeling totally relaxed. So, planning ahead of how you're going to handle that situation when they hand the papers out and you turn it over and you start to feel very anxious or you get to an essay question or an MBA question and you're not sure what the answer is, and you start to feel yourself really getting tense, even in that scenario, even under time pressure, you can take a couple of deep breaths. It's going to calm your brain. It's going to calm your body and you're going to be better positioned to actually thoughtfully answer these questions than you are if you're just kind of a total stress case, who's just like, "Oh my God. Oh my God. I don't know the answer. I don't know the answer." That's going to spiral, and then probably not great things may happen. Lee Burgess: Yeah. We've mentioned on the podcast before, but there's something very, very simple that they call tactical breathing that the military uses as well, which is very, very simple. You literally breathe in for four counts. You hold it for four counts and then you exhale for four counts. This is proven to calm your nervous system. So, snipers use this to make their hands not shake. This is no joke. I mean think about it. If they can make their hands stop shaking, that's pretty powerful stuff. You can do tactical breathing anytime, anywhere when you feel like you need to kind of calm your nervous system. It's a great thing to practice before going into the exam situation because you can call on it in the room. You can time yourself how long it takes to breathe in for four, hold for four, and breathe out for four. It's such a small sliver of time, which you're going to make that time back by having calmer nerves and being able to think more efficiently. Alison Monahan: Yeah. I've also seen this when referred to or something very similar referred to as box breathing. If you envision in your mind as you inhale, you can even draw your finger up for those counts and then you're holding, you bring it across. You exhale down and in this case, they have you hold it again at the bottom, so your finger meets back where you started but box breathing.